Each person have a different sequence, while the first time they sequenced one of the billions "human genomes". Doing different people could help finding what makes one person different from another and on the other hand what make us similar.:-)

Also, if they show interest in contacting us in the first place, they would probably value us as a source of information, so destroying earth would be counter-productive. Think on how much money is spent on making sure that our probes would not contaminate with earth life the places that it visits.

This is probably because no one uses it or care for it. Encryption is not a matter of simply slapping an encrypted channel on top of something and that something is magically secure.

Just on the top of my head I could bet that this telnet is vulnerable to timing attacks that ssh were once vulnerable. you see, telnet usually sends keys as fast as it can, so when you're typing your password the timing between the keys-down events are reflected on the timing of packages that go trough the net, with those timings you can narrow down the brute force password search.

SSH is more smart then telnet, so first it has a initial handshake that is not part of the session, so the first password, the login password, is sent in a single packet. But even for other password prompts that are asked during the session, openssh notice that the no-echo mode is activated and uses a timeout to join together more then one key on a single packet, since there is no echo this does not compromise the responsiveness of the session.

No that is still windows fault, the user is used to click thousands of those cryptic little windows that appear whenever he has to do something. He doesn't even read them anymore.

A better solution is to ask the users password before installing stuff, those prompts are rare and give the user the impression that something potentially harmful is about to happen.

On the other hand, the system can not over use it, some versions of linux require that you enter your password even to change the system time for instance. This abuse of the password prompt can make users get used to them, and just like the warning dialogs they will get trained to enter the password on demand, without thinking.

I have never actually used itunes (I use linux), but every time I have to interact with it it only gave me head aches or stood in the way of doing something.

I use mainly ogg, not because I am an audiophilie, but because I believe in open source and free from patent formats. So maybe I am a "technology zealot" as the troll bellow (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1069953&cid=26201681) said. But I am not a radical, I don't re-encode mp3s into ogg, nor I want to turn my ogg permanently into mp3, I am studding an alternate solution, I want to make the daapd server reencode on the fly when serving itunes and serve ogg streams to everyone else.

ITunes sucks it don't play ogg by default and it refuses to play ogg from the network even after the quicktime coded is installed. I have setted up a daap for my home and itunes simply does not work, while rythmbox work perfectly.

I also tried to configure songbird to see my daap, but had no luck, and my wife want something that is as easy as itunes.

Also I loved the "Dr. Horrible sing along blog" I tryed to buy the files from itunes, it is impossible, because you know you have to have a itunes installed, so one less sell.